Chapter 13

“You have a phone call,” Mom said Monday morning as I came out of the bathroom after my shower. “Nothing bad happened.”

The last part was probably because she could see the look on my face. In my limited experience so far, early morning calls were rarely for something positive. The last one had my dad using his one phone call from jail following the bar fight where he’d stabbed a man to death.

“Hello?” I said, taking the phone from her.

“Charlie, it’s Arthur Eaves. I need you to meet me at the principal’s office when you get to school.”

“Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine. I think we’ve had some movement, at least on the restraining order. I have a call first thing in the morning with the school district’s attorney, but we’ve already worked out preliminaries, so it should just be pro-forma. I’ve spoken to your mom about this but if the restrictions on your movement are changing at school, we both agreed you should be there when we spoke with the administration.”

“Does this mean I won’t be under the restraining order anymore?”

“No, but it changes how it will be handled at school. Like I said, I won’t know the final details until I talked to the school district’s lawyer.”

“Okay. I guess I’ll see you later then.”

“Okay,” he said and hung up.

“So what did he mean by a change in the restraining order?” I asked Mom.

“I don’t know. He told me he had some kind of motion in front of the judge who signed the restraining order last week, but I wasn’t clear on how it all worked. He said it went well and there would be some changes, but he still had details to work out.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said to me. I just thought he might have told you more. I didn’t realize you two were in that much communication. I thought he’d just gone quiet since you spoke with him that first time.”

“He said that I had to be present one way or another any time you spoke to him, unless I signed off on it ahead of time. I didn’t think there was anything to say and I didn’t want you to get distracted if there wasn’t really any kind of change. I promise we weren’t keeping you in the dark.”

“I know, I wasn’t trying to accuse you. I’m glad he’s making some kind of progress, because Aaron’s making it difficult to avoid him. He goes out of his way to make sure he’s walking where I need to go so the teacher with me has to make me wait or go another way. I’ve been late to class a bunch of times.”

“Hopefully this all goes away soon. I’m really worried about what will happen if this goes to court. I asked him about what it would cost us if it went that far, but he just said let’s wait and see how all the preliminary stuff goes first.”

“It’ll be okay, Mom. Chef seems to trust him, and that’s good enough for me. Okay, I gotta run to school. See you when you get off work.”

I gave her a kiss on the cheek and ran out the door for Hanna’s house. Normally Kat was already there waiting to ride over with us, which was pretty inefficient since she actually lived closer to the school, but I think she enjoyed the social time. I was a little concerned when her car wasn’t in the driveway.

I let myself in through the back door like normal and started looking around for Hanna. Mrs. Phillips had told me early last year not to bug her by ringing the bell and come in on school mornings to meet up with Hanna. She was already downstairs this morning, getting her lunch together when I came in.

“Where’s Kat?”

“She called and said she’d meet us there. Your phone was apparently busy this morning.”

Mom must have been talking to Mr. Eaves. She hadn’t wanted to pay the few dollars extra for call waiting, which made us one of the few people who didn’t have it.

“My lawyer called this morning and told me to meet him at the front office. Did she ask if anything was wrong?”

“No, but she called from her home phone and was whispering, so something’s going on.”

Kat had a cell phone but normally texted from it if she needed to get a message to us, or she’d call from a payphone or from someone else’s phone. I think her dad monitored her calls because she made it clear she didn’t want us calling her unless it was an emergency and never wanted us to call her home phone. I got the impression it might make things harder on her, so I’d gone along with that, even though I really didn’t like it.

“Hopefully she’ll be there when we get to school.”

“Hopefully. Why do you need to go to the administration office?”

“I don’t know. Our lawyer said he had a call this morning with the school’s lawyer and something about my restriction was changing, but he couldn’t be more specific until after their call. I won’t find out till I get there.”

“I guess let’s get going then. Here; Mom packed you leftovers from yesterday.”

I still mostly ate the free lunches at school, but occasionally Mrs. Philips packed me lunch, which was always far better than the crappy sandwiches I got from school.

Since I was under the same rules at the moment, Hanna dropped me off at the front door before parking and I headed straight for the administration office. There were a few other kids in there talking to Mrs. Morgan, but I could see Mr. Eaves in the back, who waved for me to join him and Vice Principal Keller by her office.

“Good,” he said as I joined them. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to discuss this with Charlie present, so I don’t have to explain it a second time.”

Mr. Keller didn’t look like he agreed, but he said, “Sure,” and opened his door waving both of us in.

We sat down in the chairs across from Mr. Keller’s desk and waited until he got seated before Mr. Eaves started explaining what was going on.

“I assume you spoke with the school’s attorney already?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m sure he explained to you that we received a judicial order on Friday ordering the district to modify their policy towards Charlie. Since the school is a supervised location and Charlie is required to be here by state law, the restriction of the restraining order is not enforceable and the measures taken to follow that order have violated Charlie’s rights.”

“He did.”

“Did he explain the compromise we came to?”

“Yes. Charlie will be allowed to return to his normal schedule, although he will still be required to keep his distance from Mr. Campbell whenever practical. He no longer has to eat lunch separately or be escorted from classes. I understand that, since the original altercation happened in our parking lot, he is still required to be escorted to his vehicle after school each day.”

“If he leaves during normal dismissal times. Since he has baseball practice and Aaron has no scheduled afternoon activities, I was told Aaron would be required to not remain on school property after school let out, allowing Charlie to leave without a chaperone.”

“Correct. Our attorney is contacting Aaron’s father now to make sure they’re clear on the changes, specifically how they affect Aaron, and then I will speak to him afterward.”

I couldn’t believe it. Not only had he managed to get rid of the stupid rules here at school that required me to have a babysitter, but also, Aaron wasn’t being allowed to stay on school property after school. I could imagine how ballistic he, and probably his father, were going to be that he actually had some kind of repercussion from his actions. It was a safe bet this was one of the few times it had ever happened.

It did make me a little worried though. Pissing off Aaron’s dad was going to make it harder to get him to agree to anything later. Mr. Eaves said he knew Aarons’ dad, so I hoped he knew what he was doing. Because, if Aaron’s dad was even a fraction of as vindictive as his son, he’d make sure to try and get some retribution.

“So does this mean everything goes back to how it was?”

“Since classes are well underway, we aren’t going to reset your schedule again,” Vice Principal Keller said. “We’ve spoken with Coach Dean and he agreed to continue letting you do conditioning in sixth period instead of the regular conditioning class, so all of your classes will remain as they are right now. Although you will no longer have to be escorted through the school, we want to make it clear that you still need to stay away from Mr. Campbell as much as possible, and we’ve made the same thing clear to him. Any further run-ins between the two of you will result in both of you being suspended. Also, you will still not have access to any school programs beyond those you have access to right now until this all gets settled.”

“Why?” I said, annoyed. “I still never really understood why the school had to pull me out of everything when it’s just his word against mine. I went along with this, but now that we have a judge saying that I should be able to have access to school, why am I still under some kind of punishment? I thought I was innocent until proven guilty.”

Mr. Keller looked both annoyed and frustrated, but was saved from responding by Mr. Eaves.

“Charlie, I know it’s not ideal, but one of the reasons we got the order from the judge was that the district submitted a brief in our petition arguing that they could ensure the spirit of the restraining order was maintained without all the restrictions that had been put in place. We are still working on getting the restraining order removed entirely, but your mother thought the first priority should be getting your schooling back in order. With the district offering to help, we were able to get this done a lot faster, but it’s under their terms. For now, we just have to take the win and move on to the next thing, rather than wasting time fighting each battle and making this whole thing take so much longer.”

“I guess,” I said, petulantly.

Except for tutoring, which I was getting from Kat anyways, I didn’t use any of the school programs, so it really shouldn’t have mattered, but I was pissed. Every teacher here knew the kind of stuff Aaron pulled and nothing ever happened, but the second he accused me of something, they just punished me without actually proving anything.

It didn’t really matter though. Until we get the whole thing resolved, it’s still going to be a pain in the ass. All I could do was wait for Mr. Eaves and be happy that at least the district had agreed to meet us halfway.

“Hey, look who it is,” Megan said when I showed up at the lunch table for the first time in a week.

“Did they get rid of all the restrictions?” Hanna asked.

“Most of them. I have to keep my schedule, which means I still have Coach Bryant for history and that ‘special’ conditioning class, but I don’t have to be escorted to and from classes anymore and I can eat in the cafeteria. Get this though, because I have baseball and Aaron doesn’t have any school-related activities, he has to leave campus right after school.”

“He’ll be pissed. I bet he goes crying to his dad,” Jordan said.

“Probably. So I’ve only been hearing stuff second-hand through Hanna. What’s everyone up to?”

“Megan broke up with Troy McCallum. Everyone’s shocked.”

“I thought he was cute,” Megan said defensively. “How was I to know I needed to be able to have a conversation with him too?”

“Our little Megan’s growing up and finding she wants more than a pretty face,” Jordan said.

Megan gave her the finger.

“I have no idea who that is,” I said, a little lost.

“He’s a junior on the chess team,” Laura said. “I’ll give her he’s not ugly, but he’s also the biggest nerd in our grade. He wears button-up shirts every day and I swear one time he had a tie on, and Megan here can’t keep the same hair color for more than two days at a time. It’s a weird match for sure.”

“You guys are just ... ohh,” Megan said, stopping suddenly and looking over my shoulder.